Download or read book Sod house Days Letters from a Kansas Homesteader 1877 78 written by Howard Ruede and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Howard Ruede was twenty-two years old in March of 1877 when he rode on a freight wagon into Osborne City, a community in west-central Kansas. A young man of courage, common sense, and independence, Ruede was filled with the optimism and determination typical of the men and women who took up the challenge of homesteading on the prairie. Brought together by economist John Ise and first published in 1937, "Sod-House Days" is a collection of the letters Ruede wrote to his family in Pennsylvania chronicling his first year in Kansas. In minute detail these letters show the hard, wearying work faced by homesteaders in the 1870s, their almost unbelievable poverty, the hardships of poor food, inadequate clothing, crowding, unsanitary conditions, the lack of decent drinking water, the bedbugs and fleas, flies and mosquitoes. We see Ruede struggling to stay out of debt, walking miles to pick up the mail or to visit a neighbor, working until his bare feet are rubbed raw by the wheat stubble of the fields, going without meat because he hasn't been able to kill a jackrabbit, cooking biscuits in a kettle over his sod fireplace. Taken together, his observations constitute a careful and graphic picture of the pioneer community in which he lived, one that joins recent studies such as Sandra Myres's "Westering Women and the Frontier Experience" in presenting an accurate, if brutal, picture of life on the western frontier. In a perceptive new foreword, sociologist Scott G. McNall considers the context within which the story of Howard Ruede unfolded. He delineates the forces and factors that contributed to the rapid settlement of the Great Plains. He reads the dominant themes that run through Ruede's letters: an almost religious faith in progress and hard work, and a tremendous concern for the idea of community. He also addresses a central question: What made these people stay? McNall writes, "The value of these materials has been not at all reduced by the passage of time. . . . [This] is the story of an ordinary person with heroic dimensions. Reading these letters, we see what values people had which allowed them to try, and then try again, after they had seen their efforts destroyed by drought, grasshoppers, prairie fires, and other disasters. . . . It is a story of struggle with the environment, of creative adaption to circumstance, of people as active participants in creating the society around them."
Download or read book Sod house Days written by Howard Ruede and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of letters by nineteenth-century homesteader Howard Ruede in which he chronicles his first year in Kansas while writing back to his family in Pennsylvania, covering topics such as poverty, unsanitary conditions, and starvation.
Download or read book The Sod House written by Elizabeth Coatsworth and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sod and Stubble written by John Ise and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A few years ago, as I listened one night to my mother telling incidents of her life pioneering in the semi-arid region of Western Kansas, it occurred to me that the picture of that early time was worth drawing and preserving for the future, and that, if this were ever to be done, it must be done soon, before all of the old settlers were gone. This book is the result—an effort to picture that life truly and realistically. It is the story of an energetic and capable girl, the child of German immigrant parents, who at the age of seventeen married a young German farmer, and moved to a homestead on the wind-swept plains of Kansas, where she reared eleven of her twelve children, and remembering regretfully her own half-day in school, sent nine of them through college. It is a story of grim and tenacious devotion in the face of hardships and disappointments, devotion that never flagged until the long, hard task of near a lifetime was done."—John Ise (from the preface) Deeply moved by his mother's memories of a waning era and rapidly disappearing lifestyle, John Ise painstakingly recorded the adventures and adversities of his family and boyhood neighbors—the early homesteaders of Osborne County, Kansas. First published in 1936, his "nonfiction novel" Sod and Stubble has since become a widely read and much loved classic. In the original, Ise changed some identities and time sequences but accurately retained the uplifting and disheartening realities of prairie life. Von Rothenberger brings us a new annotated and expanded edition that greatly enhances Ise's timeless tale. He includes the entire first edition-replete with Ise's charm, wit, and veracity, restores four of Ise's original chapters that have never been published, and adds photographs of many of the key characters. In his notes, Rothenberger reveals the true identity of Ise's family and neighbors, provides background on their lives, and places events within a wider historical and geographical context. Ushering us through a dynamic period of pioneering history, from the 1870s to the turn of the century, Sod and Stubble abounds with the events and issues—fires and droughts, parties and picnics, insect infestations and bumper crops, prosperity and poverty, divisiveness and generosity, births and deaths—that shaped the lives and destinies of Henry and Rosa Ise, their family, and their community. One hundred and twenty-five years after Osborne County was organized and Henry Ise homesteaded his claim, a corner of nineteenth-century Kansas social history remains safeguarded thanks to the tenacity of John Ise and the insight of Von Rotheberger, who enlivens Ise's story with revealing detail.
Download or read book Sod Walls written by Roger L. Welsch and published by J. & L. Lee Company. This book was released on 1991 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book What Kansas Means to Me written by Thomas Fox Averill and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays and poems by Kansas writers past and present, illustrated with 25 woodcuts from the Prairie Printmakers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The Sod House written by Cass Grove Barns and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1970-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "No one so well knows the life of pioneer settlements," writes Addison E. Sheldon in the foreword to this book, "as the country doctor, and the country editor, and it might be added, the country postmaster who (in the popular pioneer belief) knew every letter written or received by every person in the community and read all the postcards." No wonder, then, that Dr. Sheldon considered Cass G. Barns uniquely well equipped as a local historian, for Barns served his community in all three capacities. A country doctor who combined farming with medicine, he had a part in the founding and management of the first industries of Boone County, Nebraska, became the editor of a newspaper, county commissioner, and postmaster. The Sod House is a personal narrative?the intimate story of the settlement and frontier years (1867-1897) of the Nebraska prairie country lying between the Elkhorn and Loup rivers. In the worlds of Dr. Sheldon, himself a pioneer Nebraskan, "It preserves for all future generations a faithful picture of the period and the region which it describes."
Download or read book Westering Women and the Frontier Experience 1800 1915 written by Sandra L. Myres and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains letters, journals, and reminiscences showing the impact of the frontier on women's lives and the role of women in the West.
Download or read book Light on the Prairie written by Nancy Plain and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alongside sixty-two of Butcher's iconic photographs, "Light on the Prairie" conveys the irrepressible spirit of a man whose passion would give us a firsthand look at the men and women who settled the Great Plains.
Download or read book Hayseeds Moralizers and Methodists written by Robert Smith Bader and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tattered image of modern-day Kansas and how it got that way is the subject of this pioneering and wonderfully entertaining book. Robert Smith Bader traces the rise and fall of the state's reputation from the turn of the century--when it was a national leader in the two most prominent sociopolitical movements of the era, Progressivism and prohibition--through the Jazz Age--when Kansas came to epitomize strait-laced, fundamentalist values (H.L. Mencken proclaimed it the quintessential "cow state," chock-full of hayseeds, moralizers, and Methodists)--to today's consensus view of Kansas as drab and boring. The book concludes with a marvelous survey of recent popular culture and with a call for a reexamination of the state's historic strengths.
Download or read book Holy Ground Healing Water written by Donald J. Blakeslee and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people would not consider north central Kansas’ Waconda Lake to be extraordinary. The lake, completed in 1969 by the federal Bureau of Reclamation for flood control, irrigation, and water supply purposes, sits amid a region known—when it is thought of at all—for agriculture and, perhaps to a few, as the home of "The World’s Largest Ball of Twine" (in nearby Cawker City). Yet, to the native people living in this region in the centuries before Anglo incursion, this was a place of great spiritual power and mystic significance. Waconda Spring, now beneath the waters of the lake, was held as sacred, a place where connection with the spirit world was possible. Nearby, a giant snake symbol carved into the earth by native peoples—likely the ancestors of today’s Wichitas—signified a similar place of reverence and totemic power. All that began to change on July 6, 1870, when Charles DeRudio, an officer in the 7th U.S. Cavalry who had served with George Armstrong Custer, purchased a tract on the north bank of the Solomon River—a tract that included Waconda Spring. DeRudio had little regard for the sacred properties of his acreage; instead, he viewed the mineral spring as a way to make money. In Holy Ground, Healing Water: Cultural Landscapes at Waconda Springs, Kansas, anthropologist Donald J. Blakeslee traces the usage and attendant meanings of this area, beginning with prehistoric sites dating between AD 1000 and 1250 and continuing to the present day. Addressing all the sites at Waconda Lake, regardless of age or cultural affiliation, Blakeslee tells a dramatic story that looks back from the humdrum present through the romantic haze of the nineteenth century to an older landscape, one that is more wonderful by far than what the modern imagination can conceive.
Download or read book U S History written by P. Scott Corbett and published by . This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 1886 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.
Download or read book The Laura Ingalls Wilder Companion written by Annette Whipple and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eager young readers can now discover and experience Laura Ingalls Wilder's books like never before. Author Annette Whipple encourages children to engage in pioneer activities while thinking deeper about the Ingalls and Wilder families as portrayed in the nine Little House books. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Companion provides brief introductions to each Little House book, chapter-by-chapter story guides, and "Fact or Fiction" sidebars, plus 75 activities, crafts, and recipes that encourage kids to "Live Like Laura" using easy-to-find supplies. Thoughtful questions help the reader develop appreciation and understanding of Wilder's stories. Every aspiring adventurer will enjoy this walk alongside Laura from the big woods to the golden years.
Download or read book Kindred Souls written by Patricia MacLachlan and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jake’s grandfather, Billy, hears the talk of birds, is eighty-eight years old, and is going to live forever. Even when Billy gets sick, Jake knows that everything will go on as always. But there’s one thing Billy wants: to rebuild the sod house where he grew up. Can Jake give him this one special thing? From beloved author Patricia MacLachlan comes a poignant story about what we do for the ones we love, and how the bonds that hold us together also allow us to let each other go.
Download or read book On the Banks of Plum Creek written by Laura Ingalls Wilder and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2006-12-21 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laura and her family move to Minnesota where they live in a dugout until a new house is built and face misfortunes caused by flood, blizzard, and grasshoppers.
Download or read book A Lantern in Her Hand written by Bess Streeter Aldrich and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Christmas in the Big Woods written by Laura Ingalls Wilder and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1997-09-20 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long ago, a little girl named Laura Ingalls lived in a little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin with her Pa, her Ma, her sisters, Mary and Carrie, and their good old bulldog, Jack. Winter was just around the corner, and Laura worked hard to help make the little house ready for the cold days ahead. Soon there was frost on the windows and snow on the ground, but Laura and her folks were warm and cozy in their snug little house in the Big Woods. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books have been cherished by generations of readers. Now for the first time, the youngest readers can share her adventures in these very special picture books adapted from Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved storybooks. Renée Graef's warm paintings, inspired by Garth Williams' classic Little House illustrations, bring Laura and her family lovingly to life.
